Re: Moving from mailing lists to Discourse

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Thu, 7 Feb 2019 at 00:54, <makepost firemail cc> wrote:

> We already looked at Hyperkitty, and found it fairly limited in
> functionality. Avoiding Hyperkitty is what led us to Discourse in the
> first place.
Can you link that discussion please?

It was on IRC and in person discussions, and private emails between various people.

 

I'm interested what newcomers want
to do such that Hyperkitty doesn't let. Negatives of Discourse: loads
slower, broken without evergreen CSS and JS, huge blank margins. Fedora
uses Hyperkitty on its other, non-Silverblue lists.

We asked Fedora developers for their experiences, and they weren't overly impressed with it.

Off the top of my head (and after using Hyperkitty to browse Fedora desktop and devel mailing lists for the last couple of years):

 - Hyperkitty's UX is confusing, cluttered to the point of being unhelpful

 - navigating through recent discussions never makes it clear which emails are newer, and the fake threading makes it visually harder to scan

 - searching is a disaster, with results returned without any sense of what's relevant or not

 - mobile access is pretty much not supported

 - it's all just a front to a mailman, instead of being a whole packaged software; this means:

  - harder to set up and upgrade

  - no moderation tools

  - no categories, sub-categories, or tagging to organise email

  - no integration with services or additional plugins

In general, mailman3 + hyperkitty is a somewhat good upgrade on mailman2 (even though I still prefer the old archive pages compared to hyperkitty; I've been going through those *a lot* for my "History of GNOME" project), but it does not compare to other platforms like Discourse.

Ciao,

 Emmanuele.

--

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[@] ebassi [@gmail.com]